Poor mental health is the second biggest threat to a young person’s life in Canada. Even before COVID-19, one in five young people in Canada had at least one mental health disorder. Data showed that in 2018-2019 there was a 60% increase in the number of hospitalizations for mental health conditions, compared to 2008-2009. With the pandemic, demand for Kids Help Phone’s services skyrocketed, rising by 137% YOY to reach 4.6 million connections by the end of 2021.

Kids Help Phone needed to find a way to increase Canadians’ awareness of the scope and severity of youth mental health issues amidst a hellscape of worthwhile causes born of and accelerated by a global pandemic, extreme weather events and widespread reckonings with power and privilege.

Our primary objective was to increase the number of adult Canadians aware of the youth mental health crisis from one in five, to one in two.

We asked adults to lend kids their voice so more people would pay attention. Calls and texts to Kids Help Phone were read by Canadian actors to ensure that the subject matter would be heard and felt; making it clear that ‘grown-up problems aren’t just for grown-ups’.

The target for this campaign was adults across Canada who did not see the state of youth mental health as a crisis, representing about 80% of the population – adults who think that young people are important, but that their emotions, relative to adults, are less serious, fleeting or superficial.

Research revealed a disconnect between what young people said they worry about, and what their parents identified as the source of stress. It also highlighted that many parents frequently underestimated the severity of that stress, reporting their children’s concerns as less intense than the child would identify themselves.

We needed to show that serious struggles like anxiety, depression and grief were not just the domain of adults, and then we could begin to break down the false distinction between ‘youth’ and ‘adult’ mental health to make the invisible struggle of young people visible to Canadians.

We used film and radio to highlight the differential treatment of young people’s problems. We enlisted the help of Canadian actors to perform monologues based on real calls and texts of grief, anxiety and depression received by Kids Help Phone. Their adult voices ensured that the subject matter would be heard and felt.

For print and OOH, misspellings became our way to illustrate that young people seek help for the same reasons and in similar ways that adults do. In this channel, we married data with creativity; using aggregated and anonymized service data to inform the geo-targeting of creative. Ontarians saw an ad about anxiety (the primary concern amongst its people), where British Columbians saw one about depression, and Albertans, one about grief.

We also collaborated with front-line KHP service staff to ensure that the treatment of the issue had clinical input. Their expertise was critical to the execution process.

- In line with our objective to increase the number of adult Canadians aware of the youth mental health crisis from 20% to 33% in Q1 2022, 74% of those surveyed agreed that the campaign increased their awareness that youth mental health is an important issue in Canada.

- In addition, 71% said it made the challenges faced by youth more relevant to them.

- The campaign raised awareness of Kids Help Phone across Canada by 5%.

- The campaign also garnered a 22% increase in website traffic, over 26 million impressions and a 70% video completion rate on skippable :30s.